These comments are out of context; I originally made them in an email book group discussion…

I think she was trying to write an out and out humourous book with belly laughs from cover to cover, and I think she failed in that. However I found the book mostly amusing; there were good lines of dialogue and a few images that cracked me up (like when one of the ushers collapses in church and the other pick him up and carry him out “like pall bearers who have misplaced the coffin”).

I didn’t find the book overly long, but I did think it was too long to sustain the kind of humour the author seemed to be trying for. I’d have preferred to see more of the mystery and less of the slapstick.

The book did seem to drag from around about Eileen’s wedding until Samantha’s. I think I found the wedding planning more interesting than the actual execution of the weddings. There seemed to be lots of bits with no relevance to the underlying mystery.

Overall, I found it enjoyably smiley.

I thought some topics were treated a bit cursorily, um, like the mystery! Some stuff that could have worked in a darker comedy seemed out of place in this fairly light one, like the calligrapher on a drinking binge, it just didn’t seem to fit into the mood of this book.

I think the author probably could have written a more serious book, but she’d have been better suited to a shorter one with some of the more tedious bits missed out and a bit more mystery.